Modernism, Postmodernism

The early days acculturation of the sixties set out(p)s the threshold amidst modernism and what, in closely circles, passes for postmodernism. On the one hand, it is clearly an extension and reinvention of the historical avant-garde, and, on the early(a), it theat eonls the increasing obsolescence of the (modernist) divide amongst elite and mass culture, betwixt the guileisanal and the automatically reproduced.Reacting against the universalizing tendencies of noble modernism (from abstract expressionism to the world(prenominal) style), and its dedication to seriousness, abstraction, and elegance, the parvenue prowessists delighted in extending the range of fraud, in juxtaposing the exalted and the abject, the inviolable and the profane, in be vernacular and relevant, and in rudely transgressing bourgeois norms.From the point of shot of post-modern theory, the recent history of daddyular harmony give notice be seen to be label by a trend towards the broadca st and extensive mixing of styles and genres of symphony in very direct and self-conscious ways. range very simply, the account about the handing over between modernism and postmodernism in refine medical specialty outhouse be seen as the Beatles in the 1960s. The songs of the Beatles drew explicitly on diverse classical and pop outular forms and do a claim to what was for pop a parvenu kind of melodyal and lyrical seriousness.postmodernistism first emerges out of a generational refusal of the categorical certainties of mellowed modernism. The insistence on an absolute distinction between high and favourite culture came to be regarded as the unhip assumption of an older generation. One sign of this collapse can be seen in the merging of art and pop practice of medicine. For example, dent Blake designed the cover of the Beatles Sergeant Peppers solitary Hearts Club Band.Jameson (1991) distinguishes between modernist and post-modern pop music, making the argument tha t the Beatles and the furled Stones represent a modernist moment, against which firing stir and in the buff wave can be seen as post-modern. In Popular Music and Postmodern theory, Andrew Goodwin (1991) quite correctly argues that for various reasons this is a very difficult position to sustain. The Beatles and the involute Stones ar as unlike from individually other as together they are different from, say, the Clash and Talking Heads. In fact, it would be much easier to make an argument in which the distinction is made between the artifice of the Beatles and Talking Heads and the genuineness of the Rolling Stones and the Clash (55).Perhaps the best way to think of the relationship between pop music and postmodernism is historically. In most accounts, the moment of postmodernism begins in the latish mid-fifties-the same period as the increment of pop music. Therefore, in terms of periodization, pop music and postmodernism are more or less simultaneous. This does not nece ssarily mean that all pop music is post-modern. utilize Raymond Williamss model of social formations always consisting of a hierarchy of cultures-dominant, emergent and residual-post-modern pop music can be seen as emergent in the 1960s with the late Beatles, and the tilt music of the counter-culture, as principal examples, and in the 1970s with art school punk, to become in the late mid-eighties the pagan dominant of pop music.It is withal come-at-able to see the consumption of pop music and the surrounding pop music culture as in itself post-modern. Instead of an flak concerned with identifying and analysing the post-modern text or practice, we capacity look instead for postmodernism in the appendage of particular patterns of consumption plenty who actively seek out and celebrate pastiche. The whim of a particular group of consumers, people who consume with irony and take joy in the weird, is very suggestive.Flirtations with Eastern religious mysticism in the 1960s br ought new crooks the victory of the Beatles, and George Harrisons fascination with the Indian sitar, increase exposure to Indian music and to Ravi Shankar, plausibly the first distinct world player, unquestionably promoting musical sounds and structures quite different from those in the West. Prior to the winneres of Miriam Makeba, Ravi Shankar and Manu Dibango, the first African musician to pay off an planetary hit, and whose music helped usher in the disco era (Mitchell 1996), musicians with exceptional local and regional popularity were other largely unknown in the West, because their music was unfamiliar and inaccessible, and the words incomprehensible (hence horse opera recording companies took little interest).The Beatles quest for mysticism, skill and innovative sounds (which could be incorporated in Western musical structures, rather than being given a life of their own) was the forerunner of other Western performers similar searches for authenticity and difference. Paul Simons Graceland (1986) recorded face lyrics over tracks performed by black southward African bands and the vocal group Ladysmith sable Mambazo.As many critics noted, rock may have been the most popular and influential art form during the late 60s, the deepest means of chat and expression that negotiated the incompatibility of the post-modern with the preindustrial by attempting to immix a mass culture with a genuine folk culture. In the mid-Sixties, electricity, poetry, sex, and turn mixed with another combustible element, drugs, to bring forth psychedelia. Baby boomer parents worshipped doctors and high medicine and avidly ingested antidepressants and other medications to hit altered states of mental and physical health.Likewise, mess up boomers drug experimentation aimed for transport to a new personal and world instinct that would eliminate human barriers class, race, ideologydividing their parents world. By 1965, a suite of drugs coursed through the rock communit y. Dylan and marijuana influenced the Beatles Rubber Soul (1965), a folk rock record of aristocratic edges and personal introspection. Attracting a male following, The Who, the modernistic heroes, thrashed through early singles much(prenominal) as Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere and My Generation with amphetamine-fed punk fury.Acid rock borrowed sounds, scales, chords, and rhythms from most the world to garble space and succession. The Beatles adapted Indian ragas and modal auxiliary jazz to dislodge the rhythmic gumption and erase the four cardinal directions. In England, the Beatles were introduced to acid in 1965 they recorded six-gun a year later. Their variable immortalise speeds, tape loops, backward guitar and voice lines, and other experiments transformed basic rock and cut into chords, beats, and voices into a tableau of acid-soaked sound, rhythm, and poetry. Especially confuse was Tomorrow Never Knows, an early trance-rock egress. Ringo Starrs cryptical drum figure, a human heartbeat, kicked time in reverse, while John Lennons filtered vocals, chants invigorate by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, seemed piped in from creation.In a key contribution, Postmodernism, or the ethnical Logic of ripe Capitalism, Jameson over count ons postmodernism as the cultural expression of a new signifier of pileusism, characterized by communications technologies facilitating the virtually instant(prenominal) shifting of international capital, the emergence of new centres of capital (e.g. Japan) in a ball-shaped economy, new class formations breaking with the handed-down labour v. capital division, and a consumer capitalism which markets style, images and tastes as much as literal products. The commoditization of culture has resulted in a new populism of the mass media, a culture centred around the marketing and consumption of proves and appearances, epitomised by the ubiquitousness of commercial television.Despite its obvious plausibility as a general explanation of developments in popular culture, postmodernism suffers from a number of difficulties. To severely generalise, these are its frequent lack of specificity its overpreoccupation with texts and audiences at the expense of locating these within the frugal and productive context within which cultural products reside its reduction of history and government activity and its ignoral of traditional sociological notions of production, class and ideology.The postmodernist view of rock music regards it as embody the collapse of traditional distinctions between art and the commercial, the aesthetic and the unaesthetic, and the authentic and unauthentic. This view is most prominent in discussions of music video, with its affinities to denote (Kaplan 1987). Popular cultural texts of the Beatles are regarded as dynamic not static, mediated two by patterns of economic and social validation and the relationship of individuals and social groups to these patterns. This puts politic s in a position of central importance, as culture is viewed as a point of conflict and struggle, of negotiations which constantly confirm and delineate the existing conditions of domination and subordination in society.Against the backdrop of these cultural studies signposts, the construction of content in rock can be seen as embracing a number of factors the music industry and its associated technologies, those who create the music, the temperament of rock texts, the constitution of rock audiences and their modes of consumption, and attempts to influence and regulate all of these. The role of the music industry, in its drive to commodify rock and tap profits, is the starting point for understanding rock.In flash or in rock a certain historical logic can be reintroduced by the hypothesis that such newer media recapitulate the evolutionary stages or breaks between realism, modernism and postmodernism, in a flavourless time span, such that the Beatles and the Stones occupy th e high modernist moment embodied by the auteurs of 1950s and 1960s art films.Although animation was use in the early days of filmmaking and became vindicatory another form of studio production, it underwent grand changes in the late twentieth century. A major break in such style occurred with the Beatles animated film, Yellow hero sandwich (1968). Not only was the colour startle a psychedelic experience of sorts, as some commented but the animation also used a mixture of media that godly what was later called the blendo style in which cels, cut-outs, form figures and more recently computer art are blended (Cohen 1998).The application of postmodernism to popular music is primarily based on two perceived trends firstly, the increasing separate of pastiche, intertextuality, and eclecticism and, secondly, increased cultural coalition and the collapsing of high-low culture type distinctions in rock. However, rock history demontrates that the first trend oft actually reaffirm s the distinctions supposedly being low down in the second trend. Post-modern music clearly contributed to the increasingly global temperament of cultural and economic linkages, mapping out new networks of commodity flow and entrepreneurial activity.At least at a surface level, all countries popular musics were shaped by international influences and institutions, by multinational capital and technology, by global pop norms and values. flush the most nationalist soundscarefully courtly folk song, angry local diction punk, preserved (for the tourist) traditional dancewere intractable by a critique of international entertainment. The rise of rock n roll, the success of the Beatles, alongside transitions in other cultural forms, ensured some measure of ubiquity.ReferencesCentore, F. F. (1991). Being and bonnie A Critique of Post-Modernism, Greenwood Press freshly York.Goodwin, Andrew. (1991). Popular Music and Postmodern Theory, Cultural Studies, 5.Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postm odernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC Duke University Press.Kaplan, E.A. (1987). Rocking Around the Clock Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture, wise York Methuen.Mitchell, T. (1996). Popular Music and Local Identity, Leicester University Press, capital of the United Kingdom and New York.